I wake up to the sound of birds chirping. I think I hear chickens too but maybe it’s my imagination. I get out of bed and move my improvised curtain from the window to see what’s out there. It looks like the Airbnb stands on the border of a working farm. There’s a small house at the end of a green field with some agricultural machinery, a horse, and a circle of trees next to it. I can tell that the ocean is out there somewhere behind the fields and the dunes, but I can’t see it. The air is crisp but not too cold, and the clouds give the impression that it will rain again soon.
If Lisbon is quiet in the morning, then Peniche is silent. Apart from the chickens and the birds. No one is going up and down the stairs. I cannot hear anyone flush a toilet or moving chairs in the kitchen, either. It feels like I have just woken up at home on a weekend.
With Vera and Rita sleeping downstairs, I am sure I will be spared the weirdness and the inappropriate giggles I witnessed in Lisbon. It’s also nice to wake up and know that I don’t have to feel guilty looking at Anna folding the blankets that she spread on the floor to sleep on.
I kind of like this house even though I realize now it has no living room, only bedrooms, bathrooms, and a large kitchen. Maybe the guests are expected to spend their awake time around the kitchen table if they want to be together. Because we are not going to spend any time here, I decide that it is not really a problem that we have no place to slouch in front of a TV.
I think I could stay here for a couple of days even though the town did not look too promising last night. I can walk around, sit in a café for a while, see what the locals eat—and not what they feed the tourists. I wish I could stay here by myself and stop chasing tourist sites. It’s not my style, never has been. I am happy doing nothing when I’m in another country. Just absorbing the smells, exploring the food markets, adjusting to the different pace, learning how to flush a toilet and order the right thing on the menu. Museums and castles and churches and convents are okay, but they don’t tell me what to expect when I order a salad at a restaurant, or even coffee.
The last time I was in London, I was visiting a childhood friend who was living in an eleventh-floor apartment with her husband in Soho. On my first day there, after she dragged me to Buckingham Palace on foot, and from there to see Big Ben and then to a leisurely stroll along the Thames, I told her I had seen enough. All I wanted to do for the rest of my visit, I said, was sit on her balcony, talk about life, drink tea or beer or whatever, and look at the view, with the TV playing something British in the background. But she insisted on taking me to galleries and art museums and parks. I don’t regret seeing great art (Ai Weiwei is really one of my favorites) and posing in front of Karl Marx’s tomb at Highgate Cemetery. But I would have been just as happy sitting in a neighborhood café, ordering a cup of Earl Gray tea and a scone, and eavesdropping on people. As a matter of fact, seeing the piles of cigarette butts on the narrow sidewalks and trying to avoid people in business attire standing outside pubs in the freezing cold after dark with beer mugs in their hands taught me more about Londoners than all the fancy royal palaces I could have ever visited. I can visit palaces on YouTube anytime and get to know London on Google street view. But sidewalks paved with cigarette butts were not something I could have seen unless I was stepping on them myself. And I found that quite interesting.
But such unconventional behavior is not meant to be indulged on this trip. I am here with a tour guide who is determined to see as many touristy places as she can cram into the few days we have here, and I dare not make a scene by announcing that I am going to stay behind. I wish I had the courage to do it, but I don’t. So, instead, I clean up, get dressed, pack my stuff, make the bed, and prepare to face the day, whatever mishap it conspires to inflict on me.
When I enter the kitchen, Vera is sitting at the table, by herself, in her street clothes, with a cup of coffee in front of her.
“There’s hot water if you want to make tea,” she says. She rummages through her hand bag and hands me several packets of sugar. She noticed that I used sugar in my tea when we were in Lisbon and that this kitchen here is stocked only with dish soap and maybe salt if we are lucky.
I make myself a cup of tea and prepare another one of those bread, cheese, and thinly sliced tomato sandwiches. Since that unappetizing dinner at the fado bar in Lisbon, that’s just about all I’ve been eating. Not that I crave anything else. I’m fine eating this stuff. I’m probably losing some weight without even trying and that’s something I always welcome.
“I’m going to go out for a walk,” I tell Vera, who has barely looked up from her phone since I entered the kitchen.
“Can I join you?” she asks, and to drive the point home, she gets up from her chair and takes her coffee cup to the sink where she washes it and sets it on a small dish towel to dry.
“Sure, let’s go see what’s out there,” I say. I’m sure she didn’t expect me to turn her down.
Vera checks her watch. It’s not eight yet. Rita is probably still sleeping. I can tell that all the driving and planning exhaust her. “I’ll let her sleep a little longer, but she needs to wake up soon,” Vera says, as if she can read my mind. “We didn’t come here to sit around,” she repeats her mantra. I don’t argue. I prefer to be outside than to wait in the kitchen for Rita to wake up. Maybe I don’t mind sitting around, but I didn’t sign up for the pleasure of waiting for Rita to wake up every morning.
We take our luggage downstairs and step outside. The street looks exactly as I imagined it last night. It doesn’t reveal any surprises that were hidden in the dark. The town probably started as a fortified port or a fishing village surrounded by vegetable plots and pristine beaches and then grew into a surfers’ hub of some sort, none of which is apparent at the moment. We pass a deserted bakery and a neighborhood church. A man is standing at the entrance to a grocery store with his arms folded over his chest. He examines us from the other side of the street, but makes no attempt to attract us inside or even acknowledge our presence.
“I’m glad I brought this jacket on the trip,” Vera says as she unzips her pinkish-orange hoodie. “I thought it would be much colder here, but I didn’t want to carry a coat.”
That’s not the conversation starter I was expecting but I go along. “Let’s hope it stays like this,” I pay my lip service. I mean, she is trying to be friendly, I have no reason to begrudge her that. She’s a good sport. Never complains about anything and knows how to keep her cool even when subjected to her daughter’s jarring outbursts. “I don’t mind the rain,” she continues. “As long as it doesn’t snow, I’m fine.”
The street leads to a roundabout and we stop to decide whether to continue or return to the house. “It’s supposed to rain today,” I say. The weather app showed rain for today and tomorrow.
“Better than a rain of Kassams,” she muses. I look at her. Since when did you become a comedian, I’m thinking, but then it occurs to me to ask, “Did something happen?”
“I talked to Shimshon right before you came into the kitchen,” she explains. “Hamas fired 200 rockets from Gaza this morning and some reached Tel Aviv.”
“How is he? And Sigal and the kids?” I am sure everyone is OK but I still ask. I know I will not call my brother to ask if he is OK, because he would tell me that I am hysterical and to stop with the nonsense. I learned this the hard way. During one of my visits, I was at an art gallery not far from his neighborhood and heard about a horrible terror attack on a bus stop. When I called him in panic to see where he was and if he was OK, he said not to bother him with stupid questions if the attack took place more than 2 kilometers from his house. And that attack was probably 10 kilometers away or more, so I learned my lesson. I don’t ask him, but I ask other people. It’s the right thing to do.
“He said it was very noisy but we’re used to it. It was early in the morning and he was home. Nothing broke. The kids are home too because everything is closed now, everywhere. They’re happy they don’t have to go to school.”
“Any casualties?” I ask. I am so out of the loop, as if I am still in California. Although being in Portugal is too far to hop on a bus and get to Israel in a couple of hours, I feel as if I am nearby, maybe because I am around Israelis. Or maybe because I was in Israel only three days ago and I’m still under the influence.
“Nobody was killed,” she reports. “A few people were injured when they ran to a bomb shelter and one house was hit by a rocket in Sderot but no one was home.” She really got all the details. I am tempted to ask how her husband manages without her for so long—the man is almost 80—but I don’t want to pry. Besides, she doesn’t seem too worried about him.
“Let’s go back and see if Rita has woken up,” I say instead.
“And if she hasn’t, I’ll wake her up,” Vera says flatly, looking at her watch again.
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